Jeff Nelson, KNPS President

As I write this, I am looking out at our woods in southwest McCracken Co., covered in 4″ of fresh snow. I have always loved to walk in the woods in the winter. The deciduous trees have lost most of their leaves and you can see their form and structure more clearly. Most of the herbaceous species have gone dormant but dried stalks with seed heads dot the woods. And if one looks, one will also see many species of native plants still photosynthesizing away throughout any woodland in Kentucky.

There are several species of native plants that take advantage of the extra sunlight reaching the woodland floor to photosynthesize throughout the winter. One of my favorite of these species is cutleaf grapefern (Sceptridium dissectum), which grows widely in our woods. Grapefern is also known as bronze fern for the color the sterile fronds turn after a hard frost or freeze. The bronze color, caused by anthocyanins in the sterile fronds, helps the fern withstand harsh winter conditions and the extra sunlight by reducing the amount of sunlight absorbed, preventing excessive water loss, and other cell damage. Grapefern will photosynthesize throughout the winter, with the fronds usually senescing in the spring. The sterile fronds will reemerge in the summer, with the fertile fronds appearing in late summer.

The Lady Slipper newsletter of the Kentucky Native Plant Society has been published since the Society’s founding in 1986. We occasionally feature an article from a past issue. This article, from 2009, is a look at some of the oldest trees in Kentucky. This article first appeared in Winter 2009, Vol. 24, No. 2. If you would like to see other past issues, visit the Lady Slipper Archives, where all issues from Vol. 1, February 1986 to Vol. 39, 2024, can be found.

Floracliff’s Old Trees: Acorns of Restoration for the Inner Bluegrass Region

By Neil Pederson, Eastern Kentucky University

Old trees are windows into historical events. The science of tree-ring analysis takes advantage of a characteristic common to all trees: no matter how bad things get – an approaching fire, tornado, drought, etc. – trees must stay in place and absorb these abuses. Though each tree is an individual, environmental events like these impact all trees in a similar fashion: events that limit a tree’s ability to gain energy reduce the annual ring width. Scientists interpret patterns of ring widths within tree populations to reconstruct environmental history. To date, tree-ring scientists have successfully reconstructed drought history, Northern Hemisphere temperature, fire histories, insect outbreaks, etc. Tree-ring studies have also enriched human history. Scientists have dated logs from ancient structures that, in turn, triggered revisions of human history. Similarly, tree-ring evidence indicates that a severe drought likely contributed to the failure of The Lost Colony in Roanoke, NC and to the outbreak of a highly-contagious disease and subsequent crashes of the human population in ancient Mexico City. Just a few old trees in a small landscape can shed light into long-forgotten or unobserved events.